Security

Provider Security

The Fronter® Compute Engine's Secure Vault

From
the ground up, we designed the Frontier Compute Engine to insulate the
execution of tasks from your data and programs. That's why we chose to
support only the Java(TM) programming language. Other languages, such
as C or C++, offer no inherent security protection, whereas Java was
designed to be secure from its inception.

Java
is a tried and tested technology. Sun Microsystems first released Java
in 1994, and since then it has been used to make perusing the Internet
safe for millions of users. Countless Web sites use Java applets
enabling browsers to display interactive content and animated graphics.
Whenever you visit a Web page containing these applets, Java code is
downloaded and run securely on your computer.

What
makes applets secure is the restricted, self-contained environment in
which their code runs. The Frontier Compute Engine runs tasks inside
this same controlled environment. We've added tighter restrictions and
security mechanisms to this environment, making it the software
equivalent of a steel vault. By design, the tasks the Compute Engine
retrieves from the server to run on your computer have no ability to
interact with your data and programs whatsoever.

They
have no eyes with which to read credit card numbers, no hands with
which to touch files and programs, nor voice to talk to outside
computers. The risk of receiving a virus or being used in a denial of
service attack, that is inherent over any Internet connection, is not
increased in any way by installing the Frontier Compute Engine.

The
Frontier Compute Engine's secure vault verifies the integrity of a
task's code before it can be executed on a Provider's computer. The
vault's security mechanism prohibits tasks from making any network
connections except to the Frontier Server. Because the Frontier Compute
Engine's tasks focus only on computations and are locked within this
impenetrable barrier, running them is more secure than surfing the Web.

Client Security

Frontier, Protecting IP across a Massive Platform

When
building a platform to run on millions of interconnected computers
worldwide, security must be the top priority. Parabon's engineers
designed Frontier from the ground up with the strictest security
standards in mind.

Frontier uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol in all communications. Developed by Netscape®
and accepted as the Transport Layer Security (TLS) by the Internet
Engineering Task Force, SSL is the trusted industry standard for
authenticated and encrypted communications. All transactions between
the Frontier server and individual computers are safeguarded by
high-level, 1024-bit encryption.

Before
running on a provider's computer, client code is protected by
obfuscation. Since Parabon runs all client tasks anonymously, providers
never know whether their computers are working on biotechnology, chip
design, cancer research, movie rendering, or other applications.
Without this contextual information, reverse engineering is virtually
impossible.

Frontier sends out
countless numbers of tasks to run on computers worldwide concurrently,
a job is essentially "shredded" when it comes from the server. Each
provider's machine has only a tiny part of the overall problem. Until a
client puts the pieces of a job back together, the data is
unintelligible.

To ensure the integrity
of results, Parabon frequently runs canary tasks. These computations
have known answers. If a bad result comes back from a canary task,
Parabon no longer uses that provider.